www.elsblog.org - Bringing Data and Methods to Our Legal Madness

03 June 2008

Transfer Students, Part-time Programs, and US News Rankings: A Response to Ribstein

Larry Ribstein and I are having an exchange on the facts and significance of law school transfer policies. Following up on my prior post, Larry takes me on over at Ideoblog. Note that Brian Leiter got the ball rolling yesterday with this post. Larry is such a formidable intellect that I will surely lose this debate if I remain cornered in his comments section, where I cannot effectively present more data. Sometimes your own blog comes in handy.

In a nutshell, here is Larry's argument: I don't have solid evidence that a large number of schools have embraced a class-shrinking policy; further, a .37 gain in a school's median LSAT in exchange for a 10% decline in full-time class size is too big a price for too small a prize [no one had these parameter estimates at the time!]. Hence, the existence of the transfer gaming strategy is speculative. Since all law schools are trying to be as selective as possible on entry level LSAT scores, why not compensate for some of this underinclusion of qualified people by admitting proven performers as transfers? If we fully disclose and understand the risks, the costs will be properly internalized by prospective transfer students and law schools. Under this analysis, Larry surmises there is no obvious right answer on transfer policies.

Larry underestimates the data. Before reviewing the significance of the statistics in the table below, it is important for readers to understand the basic calculus for gaming the US News LSAT variable:

The median for full-time enrollment is the only measure that matters. PT and transfer statistics are irrelevant.

Most schools are tuition dependent and cannot afford to shrink the 1L class without a countervailing revenue stream.

One revenue neutral strategy is starting or expanding part-time programs, applying less stringent standards to PT admits, and letting students transfer to FT after the first year. This strategy, however, is not going to be very effective for a non-urban law school.

Another is constricting the 1L class (to get the credentials boost) and making up the revenues through more liberal transfer policies. This strategy, however, only works if a school has plausible lower ranked schools to draw from. Florida State, with cheap in-state tuition and many lower ranked schools in the state, fits this profile, though the magnitude of their transfer program (#1 on Leiter list at 24.6%) is pretty shocking.

Knowing that shrinking FT 1L enrollment is the lynchpin of the gaming strategy, here is the mean and "left side" of the FT% change distribution--i.e., the schools with lowest growth/largest shrinkage in full-time 1L enrollment.

Note that the data are compiled by quartile because the first full USNWR rankings predated the current "tier" format. Some observations: (1) the average change in FT 1L enrollment was positive throughout the law school hierarchy; (2) nonetheless, in each quartile, 25% or more of all law schools shrank their 1L FT class between 1992 and 2004; (3) schools with part-time programs tended to have the largest declines/smallest growth in full-time 1L enrollment, presumably because transfers AND part-time gaming were available to them; (4) the minimum FT% change variable is very low in most cells--why? I have heard of schools that created "special" summer programs that excluded large numbers of full-time students from their ABA and US News numbers. If all the surrounding facts became know regarding these programs, it may shock the conscience of most readers, including us lawyers.

The bottomline is this: 64 law schools shrank their 1L full-time entering class between 1992 and 2004, 27 by more than 10%. At the same time, PT enrollment has boomed and the number of PT programs has grown (by 10 in quartiles 3 and 4). We don't have transfer data for 1992 to 2004 because the attrition data was only published beginning in 1997, when the ABA-LSAC Official Guide began publishing in a standardized format to respond to pleas from US News that law schools were lying to them. See Measuring Outcomes, at 11-12. But the 1997 to 2005 data shows large increases in non-academic 1L attrition, which is the category that includes outbound transfers.

With these trend lines in place, it is easy to see the flaw in Larry's normative defense of liberal transfer policies:

[Because we have no solid evidence of class shrinkage policy,] the overall conclusion is much more ambiguous than the one Bill
draws. The tradeoff would seem to be one of adverse social impact for
more opportunity for students who prove themselves to "trade up." With
adequate disclosure of the risks, those tradeoffs are internalized by
the students and the schools.

Because it is harder to get admitted as a full-time 1L at many law schools (because the entering FT class has shrunk), these displaced students will be pushed into the transfer market to upgrade the pedigree of their JD degrees. Sure, we can disclose the risks identified by LSSSE (we could but we generally don't) and presume that our students are all adults and thus can weigh the costs and benefits of transferring. But collectively, the shrinking supply of 1L FT slots, at least at schools with some regional or national market power, has forced these trade-offs on a larger number of students. In light of the LSSSE data, more 1L admissions under whole person review (and thus fewer slots for transferring 2Ls) would improve the social networks and law school experience of many students. Further, the creaming of transfers saps the ability of lower ranked schools to reap the benefits of their innovations.

Frankly, I don't see any plausible reading of these facts that make students, as a group, or legal education as a whole (rather than individual, higher ranked law schools) better off.

Comments

I was a transfer student so I hope to shed light on a discussion otherwise completely covered by several very intelligent analysts of this phenomenon.

Per the LSAT webpage: "The LSAT is designed to measure skills that are essential for success in law school." It is believed that the LSAT has a strong correlation to first year success. This is part of what drives the LSAT wars and any LSAT-gaming phenomenon. But there is one thing which correlates even higher to first year law school success than LSAT scores: actual first year law success. Why not poach the best students from other schools? If 1L success is a precursor to future successes, transfer students are likely to succeed and provide the type of long-term alumni support most law schools hope for.

Another possible rationale for the transfer game is operational. The 1L curriculum is fairly constant across all campuses. Some of the best instructors are called upon to teach the staple courses. Most law schools run multiple sections of the same course, each taught by a separate instructor. The more sections are taught, the higher the variability of instruction to different students. Invariably, some students get the C-level teacher while others get A-level or B-level on the same topic. (See the average student experience in a property class taught by a professor with a tangential interest in property law.) This creates an inequality of education without any choice or opportunity for recourse by the students.

Contrast this with upper level legal education where often only one section is taught of every subject, and each topic is taught by someone with unique experience in the field.

How does this relate to the transfer game? A school may limit its 1L enrollment to maximize the value of its 1L educational offerings and prevent dilution of 1L faculty quality. They then can expand their faculty (particularly through the use of adjuncts) to provide a diverse upper level curriculum. Adjuncts also come with a smaller price tag and provide added benefits of providing connections to the local legal markets.

Under these two rationales, the gaming of the US News systems becomes an incidental result of otherwise sound managing and recruiting strategy.

I appreciate the large of amount of data and thoughtful analysis that is done here and in this conversation on the many blogs in general. However, one "invisible hand" must be taken naked from the glove. 1L's transferring are, in no way, "gaming" the USNWR rankings, those rankings are themselves the game. A famous poet once said, "Don't hate the player, hate the game!". Further, I may be just a simple country law student, but "follow the money".

LSAC benefits from their measurement being heavily emphasized in terms of REAL dollars, which in turn affect people's "real" lives. Yet, it seems fairly clear that what the LSAT measures best is how well you take the LSAT. Without randomly assigning 1L's to any school, like human guinea pigs to life-long smoking habits, you are left with correlations and selectivity biases. USNWR benefits from LSAC benefitting (and vice-versa). Schools that can game the USNWR benefit from the USNWR benefiting from the LSAC's benefit. You have a regular old logistical chain of distribution. You have manufactured 1L's. You have USNWR, like auto-manufacturers before them, killing public transport, in favor of the automobile. Beyond the rhetoric here, it is still VERY simple, and it is hard to understand why none of the players who form this discussion have the balls/ova to say "follow the money, it's rigged". What investment do the analysts here have?

If we can accept that corporate media outlets do what is good for the bottom line (granted, a difficult proposition, I'm sure) why can't we see clearly that the game lies with USNWR and LSAC? Like the elephant in the room, it's the black hole in the middle of the galaxy of this debate. If that's true we should see that 1L's attempts to transfer seek to undo the game... to right the unbalance that is created when the "invisible hand" of the 1L market crashes under the weight of its own greed to be the only relevant measurement.

When systems get so interlocked that there is no way out from the inefficient, if not deadly results, there is sometimes only one way out. Imagine there's no USNWR, I wonder if you can? No LSAT to kill or die for, and no gaming too. Imagine all the 1L's learning law in peace. You too! You know how the rest of the song goes.

If this is not your anthem, then you are probably part of the youth (now in law school), that found that the answer was never blowing in the wind, but right in your freaking face.

Subject: fyi re US News ranking formula and law school "transfer policies"

I thought many of you might find the following information to be of interest, as it pertains to some issues facing legal education which I've discussed with many of you in the past.

Most of you have heard me discuss various problems with the US News rankings formula, including the recent phenomenon involving a sizeable cohort of law schools that have significantly reduced the size of their entering classes in order to increase median GPA & LSAT and then re-filled their student body with second-year transfer students who are not counted in the US News formula. Because we often compete with schools ranked higher than us in US News for matriculants, we increasingly run into the situation where an applicant concludes that a school with a higher US News ranking is better without realizing that this higher ranking has been fueled by first-year class size reduction accompanied by an increase in second-year transfers.

At UF, we do take some transfers, and I believe this to be important. There are students who do not project well with GPA, LSAT, and other factors in an application file, but who do very well in law school (and, by inference, will be excellent lawyers) and we need to have a path for some of those individuals to become UF law graduates. Last year, for example, we took 10 transfer applicants into the roughly 400-student class that will graduate in 2009.

The situation I have described to you in the past receives fuller treatment at the following link: http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2008/06/schools-that-ta.html , which is titled "Schools that Take the Largest Number of Transfers (Relative to the Size of Their 1L Class"). I should mention that a group of law schools with a particular stake in this controversy are those which are "transfer out" institutions. These law schools argue that they lose their best students -- including students who will pass the bar exam at the highest rates -- to other law schools which will not invest nearly as much in training these students in bar exam subjects. At UF, however, we have less "transfer out" than we have "transfer in," so this is not a problem we face.

I have discussed with you in the past why I believe the US News rankings methodology is flawed. In my view, the problem sketched out in the Leiter Blog, by itself, illustrates an extraordinarily significant flaw with the US News rankings methodology.